150 YEARS AGO: Gamble elected as provisional governor

JEFFERSON CITY — The State Convention elected Hamilton Gamble, a St. Louis attorney and former Missouri Supreme Court judge, to be provisional governor.

The convention had deposed Gov. Claiborne Fox Jackson the previous day. Circuit Judge William Hall of Randolph County nominated Gamble, who was elected without opposition. Delegates Eli Bass, an Ashland planter, and Warren Woodson, former Boone County clerk, were excused from voting.

The convention elected Willard Hall of St. Joseph and Mordecai Oliver of Greene County to be lieutenant governor and secretary of state, respectively.

“After a life spent in labor I had hoped to pass its evening in retirement,” Gamble told the convention in his inaugural address. “I have never coveted public office, never desired public station. ... Nothing but the manner in which it has been pressed upon me ever would have induced me to yield my personal objections to it.”

Gamble, 62, was born in Winchester, Va. He moved to Franklin in Howard County in 1820, then to St. Louis in 1823. He was secretary of state from 1824 to 1826 and was elected to the three-member Missouri Supreme Court in time to dissent from the majority when the court considered the freedom petition of Dred Scott. Following established precedent, Gamble had wanted to declare Scott a free man.

Gamble said his goal was to bring peace to Missouri.

“I look back on this election as an experiment that is about to be tried to endeavor to pacify this community and restore peace and harmony to the state,” Gamble said.

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MEXICO, Mo. — Residents of north Missouri, regardless of political sympathy, would pay for damage to railroads, public property and attacks on Unionists, Brig. Gen. John Pope ordered.

Pope announced his intention to send “a considerable force” to every county seat and major town in his command area. Knowing his troops might be needed elsewhere in an emergency, he declared he would establish a “Committee of Public Safety” for each county his troops visited and hold those men personally responsible for damages.

“No one thus appointed shall be permitted to decline or shall fail to perform his duties under such penalties as the commanding general shall affix,” Pope wrote.

There was no reason why attacks on Union troops, Union supporters and the railroads could not be controlled locally, the general wrote.

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NEW MADRID — Lt. Gov. Thomas Reynolds, deposed by the State Convention, announced his return to the state with Confederate troops under Brig. Gen. Gideon Pillow.

In the proclamation, Reynolds denounced the convention and wrote that the actions of Federal officials to suppress the elected government dissolved Missouri’s allegiance to the Union. “Citizens of Missouri! In this decisive crisis of our destiny, let us rally as one man to the standard of our State,” Reynolds wrote.

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WASHINGTON — A new law passed by the special session of Congress made conspiracy to overthrow or make war on the United States, oppose the authority of the government, hinder the enforcement of federal law, or prevent anyone from taking a federal office a crime punishable by a fine of $500 to $5,000 and up to six years imprisonment in hard labor.